Leaving: A Novel (38 page)

They reached the river path while the sun was still below the horizon, and the sky turned a light gray, almost blue, in the east. The opposite bank overflowed with a tangle of pink and white flowers from which sprouted a live oak, one of its green arms arching over the water toward them. All the colorful growth was mirrored at the water’s edge so clearly that there was no distinguishable boundary between the plants and their reflections.

Easton hurried his step, in part because he was cold, and in part because his mind kept wandering into the past. This was the way he’d walked to school most mornings when the river hadn’t flooded. Even without a heavy rain, the path turned to marsh in unexpected places, and many days his feet were wet and muddy, the water leaking into his shoes where Elise had sewn the soles back on. Remembering his mother, Easton stopped himself on the trail and waited for her again. When she came astride him, he put his arm in hers, so that he would not move away from her so quickly this time. As he did so, he looked at her face for some reciprocation of his affection, but her face remained unchanged and she plodded forward. Before long, he unhooked his arm and walked ahead of her once again.

After walking a quarter of a mile, they reached the bridge to town. Easton looked around, half expecting to see the Palmer boys. But they worked on their farm now, his mother had told him, except for Kalvin, who was in jail for beating up a police officer. Others joined them, though, adults and children, bundled in their coats and scarves, coming from the main road.

The water ran swiftly under the bridge, and Easton shook his head watching it, to think that he’d ever jumped in from there. That river never seemed as dangerous as he knew it to be now, and never as beautiful either, surrounded by lush cypress and azalea, the smell of narcissus floating up to him on the morning breeze—all those times fishing and fighting on that bridge.

He’d lost track of his mother again, ahead of him this time, and he jogged to catch up. Once over the bridge, they were nearly to the Negro school. The Negro school, farther outside town than the White school, had been held in a converted brick storehouse that had been used for keeping cotton before the boll-weevil pestilence destroyed the harvest in 1921, when many of the farms switched to growing soybeans and peaches. He remembered how the Palmer boys laughed at him and told him to go off to his nigger school and learn to talk nigger, even though he couldn’t hear any difference between the way he spoke and the way they spoke. He remembered how he longed to keep walking into town, how he longed to have a school with a chalkboard and a White teacher who dressed in a pink dress, and separate grades for older kids, and books he could write his name in.

“Why are you so black?” he had asked Ronald once as they were fishing at their private spot. Easton was eight then and liked to think of Ronald’s skin as Negro compared to his own, which he considered ginger.

“Because I’m not part White, like you.”

“I’m part White?” He remembered the feeling at this revelation, as if he’d found out about some secret fortune he was due to inherit; he stood up against the rock but turned away from Ronald, knowing already that there was something shameful in that ecstatic hope he felt. “I’m not White,” he said delicately.

“Sure. Your great-great-grandfather was White. He owned this land. You and Mr. Marlboro are related.”

Easton walked to a bush and picked off some wild blackberries to toss in the water, to keep his smile hidden from Ronald. “You mean,” he asked, “if my mama had married a White man instead of Papa Samuel, I’d be even Whiter?”

“It sometimes works out that way and sometimes doesn’t.”

That next week at school, he stood up in class to inform Miss Moore that from now on she had to call him “sir” because he was White, and all the other kids laughed; but many in turn came up to him privately and asked how it might be true. At home he asked Elise if it was true that they were related to Mr. Marlboro, and she told him, “We all brothers and sisters under de eyes of de Lawd.”

On the way to the mill, Easton and his mother passed the Negro church. It was a small brick building with a steeple, and on the doors, Minister Aimes had painted the words
Let the heavens be glad, and let men rejoice: and let men say among the nations, the Lord reigneth.
These were the first words Miss Moore had taught them to read—standing out in the cold morning, a morning very much like the one Easton was walking through now, the whole class, ages five through thirteen, came to read those words on the first day of every year.

The edge of town was now clearly in sight; the big white mansions stood back on the side of the road, some three stories high, with columns and porches that wrapped all the way around and palmetto trees in the yards. The main crossing downtown was Longstreet—named for James Longstreet, the Confederate general—and Doby, renamed so in 1948 for a local Negro boy who helped the Cleveland Indians win the World Series, the same year Negroes got to vote for the first time in the Democratic primary. Shops stretched out for half a block each way at this crossing. In the last ten years, Norma had almost doubled in population to a town of three thousand, due to the new mill built next door to the old one. The clothing store at which Ruby and Elise used to sell their dresses was on Longstreet, attached to Laurel’s five-and-dime, and across the street from Carol’s, a combined grocery and restaurant, from which they had bought most of their goods all their lives. Elise had been allowed to eat there for the first time in just the last year. The
Tri-County Times
West River office, where Ronald used to work, was an office on top of the tire company. Its press was in a brick building four blocks away on the Negro side of town, connected to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which sometimes paid for the paper’s printing with community donations.

They reached the mill at seven. It was across town, away from the shops and residential area. Elise and Easton worked in a large room spinning yarn out of cotton. The room was as large as the plantation it had been built on, a hundred yards in each direction, with the spinning machines, each fifteen feet long, lined up end to end, row after row. Each steel pillar holding up the ceiling had a yellow circle taped to it with a smiley face that Jane Sloan, the spinner behind Elise, had made to brighten up the place. This was a newer facility, and now that everyone was allowed to work there, White and Black worked side by side in their departments.

Easton worked a number of rows away from his mother, but close enough that he could see her face between the pillars. It struck him as funny and absurd that here they were once again in Norma, and now they worked together in the same building. Every few minutes he would think about her and look to see if she was looking at him, but she never looked, not that he could see.

*   *   *

EASTON STAYED FOR
a week. After working at the mill, Elise walked straight home. Easton took his walk home through Norma, stopping on the way to stretch his back a few times and say hello to some of his old friends who worked at the shops in town. He’d saved enough money to get back to California, but he didn’t feel ready to leave, like he hadn’t gotten what he came for.

When he arrived back at the house, it was already dark. Easton took his sketchbook from the car and joined his mother inside. He sat at the dining table where Elise and Ruby used to sew, and he watched his mother under the naked yellow bulb as she prepared a loaf of corn bread. He kept his stick of charcoal poised over the page, hoping for that moment when she would reveal herself to him. She patted the dough with her hands, almost unconsciously, her eyes staring forward into nothing. She had a persistent gloss in her eyes, like a shell over her soul. There had been something impassable between them since he’d arrived, and though they’d been physically closer to each other than they had been in five years, he felt like they were standing on opposite sides of a glass wall. Much in Norma felt that way to him, his old friends, the river, the house and farm, but most of all his mother.

Part of it was the silence. Most of the day they were away from each other in the mill, and at home Elise seemed to be closed up in her own world. She was happy to see him, she’d said that enough times. They’d done some catching up since he’d been there, but they’d never talked about the past, as if nothing of substance had happened between them before this visit.

Elise bent down slowly to put the bread pan into the oven, extending her other hand against her knee to keep her legs from giving out: that was how he would sketch her, although it still was not exactly right.

“How old are you, Mama? You seem like a hundred-year-old woman.”

“Truth be tole, chile, I feel like a hundred-year-old woman.” But even in that very breath, she firmed herself up, straightened her hair, and pulled back her shoulders.

As he watched, Easton let his fingers trace the charcoal over the page, the slight friction of the textured paper vibrating in his fingers.

“You didn’t say how old you really are.”

“Don’t draw me like this, June Bug, with my hair all mussed up.” She pulled her bandanna out from her hip pocket and tied it around her head. She had a slight, shy smile, like a young schoolgirl worrying about the boys getting a look at her, though she was a grown woman who’d been married twice, had two children, worked in a mill all day and came home to work some more; a woman who’d seen a dead man in her daughter’s room. But still she concerned herself with a trifling vanity. Easton turned the page and started a new sketch, just a bust this time, with his mother turned slightly away with that smile.

She placed the dirty pans out on the porch to wash them in the morning and then came back in to finish a prairie-rabbit stew she was fixing, which was just her fancy name for muskrat.

“Corbet let you draw him like that?” she asked, as she washed off cabbage greens and carrots.

“Sure. I’ve done a lot of him.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure.”

“You got some of him with you?”

“Yeah. In this book.” He flipped through the pages to find one he was proud of, one of Corbet with his eyes closed listening to music—one that wouldn’t show him without his foot.

Elise dried her hands on her apron and came over to look. “Mmmmmm. There he is, all right. Sleek as a cat.”

“What you mean sleek?” Easton held the picture up toward her as if she had missed what he was getting at—a calm, peaceful man—but she had turned away and gone back to the sink.

“I mean sly as a fox an handsome as a movie star.”

Easton went back to his sketch of her as she broke off the carrot heads. He worked quickly to catch the wrinkles and curve of her mouth, the slight tilt of her head, and her stare, which, instead of looking nowhere as usual, seemed to look at something pleasant inside herself. They worked in silence for a few minutes, and the chirping crickets filled in the space around them.

“I’m so glad you come to visit me,” she said once again. He looked up and saw something new in her face, not the smile of memory or the gloss of hardness, but a sad smile, one of loneliness. She dried her hands on her apron, came over to him in his seat, and pulled the back of his head to her stomach. “You know I wished you never had to leave.”

He closed his eyes and let himself fall back into her, and everything felt right for a moment. His shoulders dropped and he let his hands hang at his sides as she ran her fingers over his forehead.

“I need you to stay around and take care a me,” she added. With that, something changed inside him, like a small crack in a dam. He didn’t want to notice it, but anger began to seep into him again. He felt like pulling away from her. The smell of onions from her hands became stronger and mixed together with lavender from her apron. He wanted to pull away, as if she didn’t deserve to hold him like this for her comfort. It was she who should be there to comfort him, not the other way around. She seemed to sense him pulling away and let go. She went back to the kitchen and picked up the chopping knife. As soon as she walked away from him, he wished she would come hold him again, and it angered him even more that she didn’t know this without his having to ask.

He went back to sketching the image of her smiling shyly, but he no longer felt a pleasure in doing it.

“When did you meet Papa Samuel?” he asked.

“Jus before de war. Well, no, I guess I knowd him since we was children, but I got to really know him once Corbet was gone to de war.”

“Weren’t you still married?”

“Course we was.” She went to the refrigerator and took out the carcass of the muskrat. She let out a deep breath as she held the animal under the water. “Dere’s a lot you don’t know about, a lot a parent don’t tell a chile, ’cause it’s not good to burden him. I don’t want to burden you wit all dis even now. Why don’t you jus draw an let me fix us supper.”

“I’m not a child anymore, Mama. It’s more a burden not to know.”

She turned off the water and looked at him. “No. I guess you ain’t.”

“So weren’t you still married to Ruby’s papa?”

“Sure. We was married still.” She took the muskrat by the leg, sliced the stomach open, and pulled out the insides. “Corbet never put foot back here long enough to get a divorce. So Sam come around and we got to keepin each other company. Folks sometimes gets lonely. That’s how dey make mistakes.”

Easton shifted in his chair. He couldn’t be sure if she was referring to him as a mistake, but it made one more crack in the dam.

“How come you liked him?” Easton had to say it quickly to get the question out at all. He was no longer drawing, his fist clenched around the charcoal.

“You sure is full of questions tonight,” she said. She opened the oven and checked the bread, then took some radishes out of a paper bag. She washed them and sliced them on the counter.

“Why did you like Papa Samuel, Mama?”

Elise stood straight and thought for a moment.

“Why do anyone like some people sometime? God’s doin, I guess.”

“But why him?”

“I felt he was handsome,” she said. “And I needed someone at de time.”